Saturday 14 June 2003 20.04 EDT
First published on Saturday 14 June 2003 20.04 EDT

A Secret Lifeby Esther RantzenCentury £12.99, pp376

For her first novel, Esther Rantzen has written about what she knows - fame and its pressures. Her heroine is an investigative TV journalist called Lucy Strong. We meet Lucy as she grieves for her friend and mentor, TV star Suzannah Piper, who has just been killed in a car crash. Lucy can't believe that Suzannah would have lost control on a road she knew so well. As she starts to dig, she learns all sorts of new things about her dead friend. Apparently, not everybody thought she was wonderful. Then the threats against Lucy's own life begin.

Possibly in order to demonstrate that the famous are, underneath it all, quite nice people, Lucy is given various characteristics signposting her normality. She had started out as a baggy-jumpered researcher (albeit one who was prepared to stay up all night corroborating celebrity facts for her chatshow-host boss) and there is a blundering naivety to her character. And, of course, the most normalising factor of all - and the easiest way to bring a female down to earth - she has trouble with her weight.

For the big front-page events that provide a backbone of sorts to the story, Rantzen takes elements of incidents that have been in the news in the past few years - the car-crash death, the murdered TV presenter, the bomb outside the TV station. As the faintly preposterous plot unfolds, we observe the desperate researchers, the hard-talking, diamond-encrusted agent and the tabloid columnist who has developed a 'calloused soul' from fighting so many journalistic battles.

In this world where appearance is all, everything must give way to the media monster. Is Rantzen trying to tell us something? When Lucy has a dilemma with her programme, the first thought is that the papers will 'have a field day at her expense'. The next, inevitably, is that her 'ratings will soar' if she can handle it right.

Lucy excuses her departed friend's treatment of her family: 'It's just this industry. It devours all of us. We never have time for the important people in our lives.' But it doesn't seem to bother them very much, at least not so as to prompt them to do anything about it. Rantzen clunkily tries to explain to her reader the paradox of a world that is so apparently shallow but yet is appealing enough to 'devour' people in its brightly lit maw.

There are moments of awareness - among the talk of how Suzannah has sacrificed her family on the altar of her success, there is a passing comment that men do the same and nobody pays any attention. Which is true. But Rantzen is too in love with this world to step back far enough to show us why Suzannah and Lucy are so prepared to give up their real lives for the publicity. Clearly, the appeal of that kind of money and fame, despite the price that has to be paid for them, should be taken for granted in all its name-dropping lifestyle glory.